Nancy J. Bailey - Furry Murder 01 - My Best Cat Read Online Free Page B

running through them.
    “ It’s okay honey,” I told her. “Daddy Two will be finished soon.”
    “It’s Daddy One,” Max corrected me with a grin.
    “No.  You’re number Two.  You’re the big, dark, solid one.”
    “That’s gross.”
    But he smiled.  He was a good-humored sort. 
    Jokes like this made it easier to cope with the loss of Rusty Halo, a ruddy Somali who had been kidnapped in a nasty co-ownership dispute.  We had adopted him as a kitten, thoroughly charmed by his back flips and other antics, and his sweet face.  He was our first Somali and our first show cat.  Our dog Reva, an ancient German shepherd, had raised Rusty as her own, even nursing him as if he were the puppy she’d never had.  Rusty developed the most peculiar habit of sucking on the tips of her ears.  She would lie there with her ears straight out to the side, while he nursed and purred and kneaded into the thick fur around her cheeks.  Max and I thought he would outgrow it, but at a stretchy eight months of age, he was still doing it, and Reva still allowed it.  The two of them were inseparable.  They slept together and would even eat chicken from the same bowl.  We were a family verging on euphoria.
    Roxanne had proceeded to ignore Rusty until he turned eight months old and began wowing the judges in championship classes.  After that, she started wanting to handle him herself and taking him home to groom and breed him.  Then one weekend she just stopped bringing him to shows.
    At first we couldn’t believe it.  Then after the third show, and no Rusty, it began to dawn on us that we might never see him again.
    Things got ugly fast.  Max had put his fist through the wall of our hotel room that night.  I couldn’t eat, and I started smoking again.  I dropped fourteen pounds that first month.  Max lost his job driving cabs due to his sleepless days.  He couldn’t handle the hours anymore.  We contacted the police, and the show committees, and the directors at CLAW, but everyone said the same thing:  Because Roxanne was his legal co-owner, she had the right to keep him.
    We filed a lawsuit against her in small claims, but she bumped it into civil court, full well knowing that we couldn’t afford that.  We were barely getting by on my paltry schoolteacher’s income.  We were forced to drop the suit.  Roxanne Moore had effectively ruined our lives, at least temporarily, and we couldn’t do a thing about it.
    We would rather Rusty had died.  Not knowing what she had done with him was torturous.
    Coming back to the shows was Max’s idea.  We thought eventually, Roxanne’s greed would overcome her and she would either bring Rusty out again, or someone in the cat fancy would hear of what had happened to him.
    Obviously, if we were going to continue showing, we needed a cat.  Instead of a Somali, we went with the Bobtail, a darling white female with black patches.  She had one blue eye, and one gold, and when she was little she garnered lots of attention from passersby.  Reva was so grateful for this new baby, immediately adopting her.  The kitten, after an initial panicked hissing phase, quickly adapted to the constant grooming and mothering by the big dog, and nestled in with her at naptime, much as Rusty had.
    The kitten’s short hair was much easier to groom than Rusty’s had been, so there wasn’t much to preparing for a show.  We read up on the breed standard and thought we understood what the judges would be looking for.  Even from the beginning, our Bobtail kitten was very distinctly Japanese.  She had high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and a wonderful pom-pom tail.  Her hind legs were longer than the front ones, but they angled so much that her back remained straight.  She was very lean, trim and agile. She was like a work of art; a haiku or an ink painting.  Max and I were both completely smitten with her.
    We hadn’t come up for a name for her yet.  “How about Geisha?” Max had